


The Way It Is

by amalin



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, Harry Potter Epilogue Compliant, M/M, Past Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Pining, Post-War, Seriously No One Is Happy, Unhappy Ending, You Have Been Warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:02:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25738510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amalin/pseuds/amalin
Summary: ‘Give it time,’ Hermione advised. Harry was draped atop the Potions book he was supposed to be reading, the instructions for Stinging Solution an ironically cool comfort against his cheek, her fingers carding gently through his hair. ‘It was just—you’ll feel better, in time.’‘And if I don’t?’‘So dramatic,’ she said, but it was fond. ‘I mean, come on, Harry. It’sMalfoy. How long could it really have lasted?’
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Comments: 24
Kudos: 101





	The Way It Is

**Author's Note:**

> I started this back in 2008, trying to reconcile myself with the epilogue and the gravitational pull of all their accumulated choices, then came back to it whenever I wanted to feel maudlin and meditate on regrets. So, this is a twelve-years-too-late, epilogue-compliant, depending-on-your-reading-either-bleak-or-bittersweet story where everything happens just as it was meant to happen and not a single one of them knows how to live happily ever after.
> 
> What a strange fic to reappear with and randomly unload here in the year 2020, you might think, and you'd be right! Sorry to everyone but especially you, Ginny Weasley.

The wedding is in October, one cold weekend. All the trees in the graveyard beside the church are a crying red, and the wind makes a hurricane of Hermione’s hair. Molly Weasley bursts into sobs before Ginny can get halfway down the aisle. ‘ _Mum_ ,’ she says, blushing, ‘Mum, come on now—’

It’s a quiet affair, no reporters, no photographers at all. Hermione’s the only one with a camera—Muggle pictures only, Harry insists—and she snaps as much as she can: Charlie, straightening George’s robes; Fleur, holding Victoire’s hand with her left, as her right settles on her pregnant belly; the roses wrapped around the ends of the pews, dark red, a sad color. Harry hadn’t wanted an autumn wedding at first, had thought all weddings should be summer ones like the first he’d attended, but fall is Ginny’s favorite season. Fall, like Ginny, all gold and red, coming down the aisle towards him and hushing her mum out of the side of her mouth, half-laughing, walking faster as if she can’t stop herself. She folds into him so easily when she reaches him, her back warm and exposed against the palm of his hand, and she giggles, says, ‘Fancy meeting you here,’ and from the back of the church, Harry hears Hermione’s camera snap, hears Arthur Weasley give a small cough.

Ginny’s cool hand finds his and squeezes. ‘Wanna get married?’ she says casually.

He smiles back. ‘Sure.’

Outside the wind’s blowing hard enough to whistle, and Harry’s left knee is aching from a fall he took during a case last week; _we gather here today_ says the man before them; the sun knifes through the trees outside. Ginny is not looking at the man marrying them or her mum or anyone but him.

‘I’m so happy,’ she mouths halfway through the ceremony, smile irrepressible.

Harry squeezes her hand, the pads of her fingers rough from Quidditch practice, her chipped gold nail polish. She smells like flowers, her mum’s perfume. He’s never liked anyone as much as he likes Ginny.

He isn’t in love with her, but he’s trying.

After the Burrow fills up with people and then slowly empties again, after Ron’s third drunken toast and Hermione’s fourth roll of film, after Andromeda takes a wailing Teddy home and Molly catches Bill and Fleur snogging in the kitchen ( _the two of you are like a couple of randy teenagers!_ at the exact moment the other room goes quiet), after all that, Harry lets all of Ginny’s brothers slap him on the back and then steps through the Floo, Ginny’s hand in his, to tumble out on the floor of his flat.

It’s October, so it’s cold, nothing like the roaring fire and full living room of the Burrow, just an empty bedroom and Ginny’s breath visible between them, his knee acting up again. ‘Is the heat on or what?’ she says, and goes to investigate the charms. Harry takes off his dress robes, his shoes. When she returns, he’s naked from the waist up, and she says, ‘It’s fucking freezing,’ and strips off her dress in one struggled motion.

‘C’mere then,’ Harry says, and she does.

They’ve only had sex twice before, both between the spring of sixth year and the end of that summer, because after the war they didn’t speak for a year, and after that Molly Weasley did not have Voldemort to preoccupy her and protected her daughter’s supposed virginity with the tenacity of a Gringotts goblin. 

He goes down on her until lying there with no blankets makes her tremble more from cold than from his mouth, and then she yanks him up and straddles him, her hair in dark shadows around her shoulders, her breath coming fast. Her hands are icy; she says, ‘I want to, want you to fuck me.’

‘That easy, are you?’ Harry says with raised eyebrows, and she almost smacks him in the shoulder but for the way he guides himself into her, slow, until she is on top of him and giggling, and she whispers in a rush, ‘We’re _married_ ,’ and then she’s moving, and it’s better than he remembered, better than—

‘Look at me,’ Ginny says, so he does, both their eyes wide open in the dark, searching each other’s gazes while they gasp and lose the rhythm and find it again; at some point he flips them and braces over her, as she says, _Harry, Harry_ , and he comes that way, eyes still locked with hers. ‘Please,’ she says, and he fingers her til she’s breathing fast again, making soft urgent noises he has almost forgotten, the ones that make him half-hard again, make his throat close up with surprise—even now, even now—that she’s his. After she comes, he wraps his arms around her and wraps the blankets around them.

‘I’ve missed this,’ Ginny says contentedly as she settles against him, as if they had ever really had it.

 _This_ , Harry thinks.

This, forever.

After the war he couldn’t talk to her. 

‘I’m sorry,’ he’d say, when she didn’t understand, but he never mustered any other words to explain it. He knew it was irrational, but he couldn’t bear her tears when he had been the one camping in the cold, watching Hermione grow thinner, running his fingers over the Marauders’ Map and dreaming of warmer days. He had been there, and she hadn’t. 

‘You can’t blame _her_ ,’ Hermione said, and he knew that, but he did.

They’d thought repeating seventh year would be easier because the war was over and Kingsley was at the Ministry and McGonagall at Hogwarts, but it was worse, almost: Slytherin was nearly empty because no one dared come back, and the rest of the houses showed their casualties. To make up for the silences, Ginny was louder and brighter than ever, and Harry hated it. Ron and Hermione broke up three times, and on the fourth they said it was for good. Ginny slept with Dean Thomas and Harry stopped speaking to her entirely and then Ron left in November to work with George in his shop. Molly Weasley sent everyone a Howler, and Ron three, but he couldn’t be convinced to come back. Hermione knitted a lot of hats, and cried a lot, and whispered with Ginny, who was not talking to Harry either.

It was almost a relief when Draco Malfoy found him in the hall after Charms and punched him in the mouth. 

It was worse, though, when Malfoy found him in the library the next day and said carefully, ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have, my mother just died.’

Harry meant to say, _now you know the feeling_ , but the words that emerged were, ‘I—sorry,’ and after a few minutes of waiting for more and not getting it, Malfoy went away.

Malfoy was different, Harry mused later. It wasn’t like Malfoy to apologize, though come to think, it wasn’t like Malfoy to punch him in the mouth, either. He was more likely to complain loudly and get Harry detention, and then write a song about it that got stuck in everyone’s heads for no apparent reason, and then get his friends to punch Harry in the mouth.

Then again, Harry hadn’t seen Goyle around, and as for Crabbe, well.

The next time he saw Malfoy, he punched Malfoy back, not very hard, and said, ‘We’re even,’ and then Malfoy kicked him and Harry tackled Malfoy and they rolled along the hallway. It was weird and desperate and more like a struggle than a fight, and Malfoy’s eyes might have been a little bit wet.

‘ _Now_ we’re even,’ he said afterwards, when blood was trickling down his face and Harry had scratches on his neck and the assurance of a black eye the next morning.

They started seeing each other. Just that, seeing each other. At breakfast when Harry would look up from his porridge, Malfoy would be looking at him, and then he’d look away. Harry stared at him in Potions, the finger-bruises on his neck and the way he limped out of the room. He was playing it up, of course, though Harry had to admit, the bruises were real.

Harry saw him in Transfiguration and at dinner and sometimes in the corridors, though it was always a surprise; in years past, Malfoy had always been flanked by his friends and Harry had seen or heard them coming, but now it was just Malfoy, his thin little figure trying to strut, and every time Harry glanced up he was taken by surprise, as was Malfoy, and they’d look at each other for a second.

Harry had to admit, it was weird.

But it was okay, and it felt right, even, when he unfurled the Marauders Map and saw Malfoy’s dot moving from the Slytherin common room up to the seventh floor, night after night until Harry couldn’t take it any more and wrapped himself in his Invisibility Cloak. Ron wasn’t around to stop him, and he wasn’t speaking to Dean, and Neville was always out late, blushing and holding hands with some girl from Ravenclaw. Maybe it was multiple girls; Harry could never remember.

So he went to the Room of Requirement, and waited, and fell asleep curled up against the wall. 

It felt familiar, and it was something to do, so he went back.

It must have been January when Malfoy finally tripped over him and yelped, then said, ‘ _Potter_?’ Harry blinked out of sleep, and Malfoy kicked him. ‘Stalking me again?’

‘No,’ Harry said, then couldn’t think what else it was that he could be doing, lying in the corridor outside the Room of Requirement at six in the morning, shivering a little. His cloak had fallen off him in his sleep, and now it lay crumpled at his feet, keeping half his right leg invisible.

‘Just,’ Harry said eventually, ‘suspicious.’

Malfoy’s lip curled. ‘There are no conspiracies left, Potter.’

‘Then what are you doing up here?’

‘Sleeping,’ said Malfoy. Then he colored, as if realizing a half-second too late that he should have answered otherwise, and added belatedly, ‘Not that it’s your business.’

‘Why here?’

‘Because,’ Malfoy flushed, ‘it’s the only place I—ugh. I don’t need to explain myself to you.’

‘I can’t sleep either,’ Harry offered. ‘In my bed, I mean.’

‘Yes, I imagine cold flagstones are a good deal more comfortable,’ Malfoy said dryly, looking down at Harry where he was slumped. The sun was coming up through the windows and it cast a rosy light across his face, making him look as if he were blushing.

‘Stop stalking me,’ Malfoy said.

Two nights later, Harry opened his eyes to see Malfoy looming above him where he was curled against the stone wall. Malfoy was prodding him with his foot, not gently.

Blearily, Harry said, ‘What time is it?’

‘Half three,’ Malfoy said with an impatient little sigh. ‘I couldn’t sleep for your snoring.’

‘I was not snoring.’

‘No cloak this time,’ Malfoy observed. ‘I know you’re the Golden Boy, above the law and all that, but you could at least make an effort at acting like the rest of us. What if Filch came along?’

Harry just looked up at him, still half asleep. ‘What?’

‘For Merlin’s sake, Potter,’ Malfoy said, then yanked him to his feet. ‘Oh, come on.’

Harry followed him dutifully back into the Room of Requirement, where the room was cloaked in shadows and the sheets were cool and soft. He fell back asleep almost instantly, before Malfoy could lie down beside him, and in the morning he woke to an empty room. The only signs Malfoy had been there were the Slytherin colors on the bedclothes, which Harry changed to red and gold out of spite.

He was late to breakfast. Malfoy glanced up when he walked in and didn’t stop looking until Harry stumbled into his seat.

‘Dean says you haven’t been sleeping in your dormitory for weeks,’ Hermione said to him in the common room a week later. She didn’t even look up, instead directing her frown at her copy of _Numerology Today_ , as she flicked through the pages.

‘That’s none of his sodding business,’ Harry said crossly. ‘He should be more concerned about where he’s sleeping, and who with.’

‘With whom,’ Hermione said. She sounded absent-minded, mild, but eight years of friendship meant Harry knew the calculation behind her casual tone. ‘And I’d imagine he’s sleeping in his dormitory bed, if he’s noticed you aren’t.’

‘You know what I mean, Hermione.’

‘Are you telling me you aren’t sleeping in your own bed because you don’t want to be around Dean? He’s not seeing Ginny anymore. Even if he were, he would never bring her up there, you know that.’

‘I’m telling you it’s none of your business,’ Harry snapped. ‘And he is too seeing Ginny, I saw them sitting at breakfast together.’

Hermione snorted. ‘I saw you sitting next to Romilda Vane at supper, does that mean you two are an item now? Is that where you’re sneaking off to, after hours?’

‘It’s none of your business,’ Harry repeated grumpily, though he couldn’t help but smile a little at her.

‘Well, I’m sure you and Romilda will be very happy together,’ Hermione teased. ‘Seriously, though, Harry. If you’d just talk to her. She’s not seeing Dean. She’s been really unhappy, actually, and I think if you just talked—’

‘Like you’re talking to Ron, you mean,’ Harry cut in. ‘Except wait, you aren’t, so.’

‘That’s—different.’

‘Is it?’ Harry said, rolling his parchment up. Technically, it was supposed to be two feet on the Troll Wars of 1752, but he’d liberally added sketches of angry trolls between paragraphs to meet the length and hoped Binns wouldn’t notice. ‘Good night, Hermione. I’m going up to bed. In my dormitory. To sleep.’

She just sighed and let him kiss her on the head. ‘You had better, Harry Potter.’

By the time Harry crept back out the portrait hole, hidden under the cloak, Hermione was fast asleep in her chair with a thick, dusty book in her arms, an old Weasley jumper draped over her knees. _So much for sleeping in dormitories_ , Harry thought, and fondly tucked her jumper closer around her before slipping out into the hall.

In the weeks that followed, Harry learned that Malfoy fell asleep on his back, both hands crossed over his stomach, the right always higher than the left. He learned that, within half an hour of falling asleep, Malfoy curled onto his side, almost fetal, his hair brushing Harry’s neck, his breath soft on Harry’s shoulder. He expected this to annoy him, but learned that it didn’t. He learned that Malfoy slept in black, grey, or blue pyjamas, but never green, and got cross whenever Harry showed up before he could feign sleep. He learned that Malfoy had the same dreams he did, or close enough, because Malfoy often whispered _no, no_ in his sleep, and sometimes whimpered. Once he woke up screaming, and Harry put a hand over his mouth before he could think, which somehow turned into Harry stroking his cheek a little, before Malfoy half-heartedly shoved away and curled further into himself. He learned that Malfoy was an early riser, and always stretched when he got up, like a cat. He only learned this because the careful dip of the mattress as Malfoy stood usually woke him and he blinked at Malfoy through the early morning shadows, though Malfoy always pretended Harry was still asleep, or that he wasn’t there, never had been.

Harry learned that, sometimes in the night, Malfoy would slide his fingers over Harry’s ribs and keep them there, in an absurd echo of how he’d clutched at Harry the last time they’d been in this room, Fiendfyre at their heels. Sometimes Harry would lie there feigning sleep for long minutes, timing his breathing, until Malfoy’s trembling grip on his ribcage grew heavy and loose. On those nights, Harry learned, he never once had a nightmare.

It was sometime in February when he woke to Malfoy sitting up beside him. It was still that foggy window of time between sleep and daylight, and the rustle of blankets stirred something warm in Harry’s chest, the same rush of fondness that used to well up when he woke in the tent and heard the low murmur of Hermione and Ron talking outside, or the clink of Hermione’s spoon against her teacup as she sat with her book, the quiet intimacy of lives overlapping.

Lying there with his eyes open, Harry murmured, ‘Breakfast isn’t for hours.’

‘You’re awake,’ Malfoy said sourly, after a few seconds passed and Harry did not obligingly pretend to be asleep again.

‘Yes.’ He rolled onto his side and actually looked up at Malfoy, who had his legs over the edge of the bed but was now turned back, looking at Harry. Hazy pre-dawn light softened the sharp lines of his profile. ‘I usually am, when you leave.’

Malfoy sniffed. ‘You needn’t make it sound like I’m creeping away from a lovers’ tryst, Potter.’

‘Hmm,’ Harry only mumbled. ‘Come back to bed, Malfoy.’ He meant it to sound joking, riffing off Malfoy’s own comment, but it came out sounding like an invitation.

Malfoy made a low little sound, and then he was swinging his legs back around to lie stiffly back beside Harry. ‘Happy now?’

‘Mm,’ Harry said. He reached out and blindly patted at Malfoy, who was rigid at his side. ‘Relax.’

‘I am!’ said Malfoy, as Harry’s hand found his chest. Under his palm, Harry could feel Malfoy’s heartbeat rabbiting away. ‘Now what, may I ask? Shall we share dormitory gossip? Quiz each other on our Charms homework?’

‘Just,’ Harry said, wanting something, unsure of what. He propped himself up on one elbow and then, simple as leaping on a broomstick, he knew it as he did it, leaning down until their mouths met. It should have been angry or harsh or startling or desperate, but instead it was just—easy.

Easy, how Malfoy did relax, all of a sudden, with Harry’s mouth on his. How one of his hands came up to tangle in Harry’s hair, tugging gently. Easy how natural it was, to pant against Malfoy’s mouth, as he gave a soft laugh and said, ‘Oh, well, or there’s that.’ Easy to swoop back in and kiss him until he was breathless, until his ankle twined restlessly around Harry’s and his cheeks were pink and warm.

Easy, how later, as Malfoy’s hand was on the door, Harry said, ‘Come back here tonight. I mean, meet me. Will you?‘ and Malfoy said, ‘Yes.’

In the weeks that followed, Harry catalogued it: Sometimes Malfoy kissed him like he was preparing a difficult potion, deft and careful, like he’d given a lot of thought to the precise way he tugged at the collar of Harry’s shirt and tilted his head and pressed their mouths together. Sometimes he was languid with it, in the mornings, when the first rays of sun crept drowsily across the blankets kicked down around their feet. Sometimes it was properly filthy, open-mouthed and panting, as he shuddered under Harry. And sometimes it was almost angry, when he turned back for a last, fierce press of his lips against Harry’s before tiptoeing to the Slytherin dormitories in the morning, or just once, coming across Harry in an old Quidditch jersey and worn Muggle jeans in the corridor outside the Prefects bath, and shoving him back against the wall, hissing, ‘Why do you always—must you be so—!’ and kissing him, hard and desperate.

Harry learned that he liked that, liked the way Malfoy kissed Harry in all manner of moods, liked the way he looked a bit dazed with it afterward, liked it all, all of it, every bit.

The first time Harry had sex with Malfoy, they were in Grimmauld Place over Easter hols. Harry’d set up camp in a second floor bedroom and had been _Accio_ -ing snacks from the kitchen for a full day by the time Malfoy arrived, toting a half-empty bottle of Firewhisky and clad in a soft cashmere jumper that Harry immediately wanted to peel off him. In the doorway, Malfoy paused to sneer at the picture Harry made, cross-legged in bed in the t-shirt he’d slept in, a packet of crisps abandoned on his bedside table.

‘Put a lot of effort into entertaining, do you?’ said Malfoy disdainfully.

‘Come here and take your clothes off,’ Harry countered, tugging his own shirt over his head. He was gratified when Malfoy promptly went pink and did as he said.

It might’ve been that he’d spent a full twenty-some hours alone at Malfoy Manor before arriving, or perhaps it was finally being away from Hogwarts, where Peeves might swoop through the wall with a cackle at any moment, but Malfoy wasted no time crawling into Harry’s bed. Possibly the Hogwarts bit, Harry mused as he bit at Malfoy’s jaw, because snogging in the Room of Requirement was one sort of secret, but here, Harry could feel the content, undisturbed thrum of the House of Black’s wards at the back of his mind, and knew Kreacher had been at Andromeda’s all evening. They were well and truly alone. 

He felt a bit wild with it himself, that Malfoy was there with his funny drawl and his abandoned liquor and his long, bare legs twisted up in Harry’s sheets. He abruptly wanted to keep him there, pliant and panting, for hours, for days.

Into Malfoy’s neck, Harry said, ‘Malfoy, god,’ and a little muttered, helpless, because he’d been thinking about it since arriving in his drafty, dark house, ‘wanna fuck you.’

‘ _Do_ you,’ Malfoy said, and twisted in Harry’s grasp, but then a second later he gave Harry a complicated, lopsided little smile and said, ‘Okay.’

Okay, and it was, it was more than okay, Harry working his fingers inside him for what seemed like hours until his whole hand was sore and Malfoy’s hips jerked and he said, ‘please, Potter,’ and Harry said ‘please _what_?’ but it didn’t matter that Malfoy didn’t answer. He went as slow as he knew how and Malfoy’s expression still twisted, but then by degrees it untwisted and loosened until his mouth was making these startled, lewd little noises. Harry concentrated on them, on how many he could get Malfoy to make, and then he wrapped his fist around Malfoy’s cock and got the angle right and kept getting it, and Malfoy’s little breathy noises went uneven and ran into one sound that was almost a sob. Harry made his own sounds then, saying words into Malfoy’s ear that did not string together, _god you’re so_ and _fuck, Malfoy, just keep, yeah_ , and he didn’t know he was coming until he was and was and.

Lying there after, Malfoy curled his hand into Harry’s hair at the nape of his neck and said shakily, ‘ _fuck_ , Potter,’ and Harry said, ‘That’s the general idea, yeah.’

He was grinning, he was happy, he could stay like this, he thought.

And then it was May, with all the windows in the Great Hall flung open to the sultry spring evenings and an expectant sort of energy in the air. At the beginning of the month, Hogwarts had a solemn memorial service that Ron Flooed up for, standing out in a sea of Hogwarts black in his fine new dress robes. He sat between Harry and Ginny, who were barely on speaking terms, and took pains not to look at Hermione, who was on Harry’s other side pretending Ron didn’t exist. Afterward, Ron and Ginny had a whispered, furious row in the Entrance Hall, and Harry wondered miserably if any of them would be talking to each other by the time summer came. His collar felt too constricting all day. Malfoy was nowhere to be seen. 

They fucked a lot that month, and talked less, and the suffocating tightness in Harry’s throat grew and grew, like a slow-release spell. Finally, in the Slytherin dormitories on the night of Malfoy’s birthday, with Harry staring down at a letter addressed to _Sir D. Malfoy_ from a Potions apprenticeship in Estonia, they had their own row, and Harry said in a betrayed voice he barely recognized, ‘And what about me, then?’

‘What _about_ you, Potter?’ Malfoy said. He added, almost bewildered, ‘You’ll go back to your life.’

‘This is my life,’ said Harry dumbly.

And Malfoy said, ‘Potter. It’s not.’

‘I thought,’ Harry said, ‘we.’

And Malfoy looked at him, his pale gaze inscrutable and possibly a bit pitying. Far away, Harry heard the dull thud of two grindylows chasing each other into the common room windows, the pop of a log on the fire. The set of Malfoy’s mouth seemed sad, but in recollection, later, Harry thought perhaps that had just been him, seeing what he wanted to see.

Malfoy finally said, simply, ‘I can’t.’

‘He’s such a coward,’ Harry said furiously to Hermione, later in the library. He rubbed at his eyes; they felt gritty, tired. ‘Fucking Slytherins.’

‘Give it time,’ Hermione advised. Harry was draped atop the Potions book he was supposed to be reading, the instructions for Stinging Solution an ironically cool comfort against his cheek, her fingers carding gently through his hair. ‘It was just—you’ll feel better, in time.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘So dramatic,’ she said, but it was fond. ‘I mean, come on, Harry. It’s _Malfoy_. How long could it really have lasted?’

‘I don’t know,’ Harry said. He really didn’t. Had he actually thought what bloomed in a room that disappeared once they left it could withstand the cold permanence of Daily Prophet headlines, mutterings in Diagon Alley, Howlers from witches he didn’t even know? Had he really given thought to what it might be like, to meet up for drinks with people Malfoy had insulted and spat on and perhaps even tortured? Had he thought of them sharing a flat, getting takeaway on muggy summer nights, Malfoy dropping careless kisses on his shoulder in the kitchen in the morning?

_Come on, Harry. It’s Malfoy._

‘I hadn’t thought, really,’ Harry said, and Hermione gave a satisfied _hmm_ , as if she’d solved a particularly vexing Arithmancy problem and that was the end of that. She went back to the essay she was writing, already on her second scroll of parchment, and Harry stared down at the tattered cover of his Potions text.

It was just that, when Harry did think at all, he had thought—

Well, he had thought that once the war ended, he could have what he wanted.

Harry left school, and so did Malfoy. Harry joined Auror training, and Ron didn’t. He did meet Harry and Hermione for drinks, though, every Friday near the Ministry. Harry never asked exactly how they’d made up, but the world slowly recalibrated, as if the past year had never happened. Some days Ginny even came along, smiling at Harry like she too wanted to put Hogwarts behind them, and one day it felt as routine as breathing for Harry to go home with her to the Burrow, to stay as close as possible to her loud laughter and the firelight glimmering on her hair, instead of his cold, empty flat.

And time passed.

Harry worried sometimes that there might be something wrong with him, that love and romance didn’t come easy the way it did for his mum and dad, or Molly and Arthur, or Remus and Tonks. Even Petunia and Vernon, come to think. ‘Maybe I’m fucked in the head,’ he said to Hermione one day over stale sandwiches in the Ministry cafeteria, and she almost spit out her pumpkin juice, then patted him on the hand.

‘You’re not,’ she said. ‘Or we all are.’

‘Comforting,’ Harry said, half-smiling at her.

‘Really, Harry,’ Hermione said, in that firm, warm tone he’d started to think was a bit motherly.

There were moments when he missed the clarity of the war, the single-minded purpose he’d awoken with every day. Times before sleep when he recalled how sweet the grass in the Forbidden Forest smelled, as he walked to his death between birdsong and budding trees, certain and sure. Nothing had smelled quite as sweet since. 

‘It was a difficult time,’ Hermione added, after Harry had been silent for a while. ‘No one came out whole. Not me, not you, not—’

‘—Malfoy,’ Harry said before he could stop himself.

‘Well, if you like.’ There was a pause. She peered at him. ‘Harry, you don’t still—’

‘No,’ Harry said, his voice going warped and small in a way he wished he could control. He felt, abruptly, as if he might cry. ‘I don’t know.’

‘I think there’s a danger in dwelling too much on the what ifs,’ Hermione said carefully. ‘They bear the weight of all we wish our lives were, and all reality can do is hope it matches up.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I want you to be happy, Harry. I just don’t want you to be pining for this grand romance you think you could have had, when it never would have—’

Harry laughed, a little brutally, and she stopped, looking hurt.

‘A _romance_? Really, Hermione.’

‘I’m only saying. Don’t make it out to be more than it was,’ Hermione said gently. ‘That’s all.’

So said Hermione, who had dated a string of people since leaving Hogwarts, each of them less red-headed and Weasley-like than the one before. The latest, in fact, was a Muggle-born American woman on a study abroad program in London, an unsmiling academic who talked at length about complicated magical theories and who did not like Quidditch. Ginny thought she was, quote, bloody awful.

‘I’m not,’ Harry said.

Three days later he proposed to Ginny, with a small gold ring he’d found in the Potter vault, after Sunday dinner at the Burrow. Everyone cheered. George and Ron broke out miniature fireworks for the occasion, which went fizzing merrily in red and gold sparks around the room and nearly caught Percy’s hair on fire. Hermione squeezed him extra tight after, and he tried not to feel betrayed.

The day before the wedding, he was nodding off over one last pint with Ron, the others long gone (Neville to his latest girl, George to the shop, Dean begging off early after frowning through most of the evening).

‘Are you happy?’ Ron said, out of nowhere.

Harry looked into his drink, as if the last swirling dregs of it might offer him an answer. After a long moment, he said, ‘Yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’

Ron pressed on, not looking at him, ‘Did you love him?’

Harry swallowed hard over the sudden ache in his throat. He never would have used that word. Malfoy would have killed him for thinking it.

He said, ‘Yes.’

Ron didn’t react, which was telling.

‘You knew?’

Now Ron looked at him, half-exasperated in the dim pub light. ‘What kind of friend do you think I am, Harry?’

‘What does it matter, though,’ Harry said. ‘I mean. Right?’

And Ron said, ‘Right.’

Harry thinks about that moment sometimes, and what it would have meant if Ron had said something different, or if Harry himself had. It would be easy, really, to think of that moment as the choice. To think that he could pinpoint that moment as the crossroads, the wrong or right turn. But he thinks, too, of Malfoy’s clipped _I can’t_ , and Hermione’s frown when she said _what ifs_ , and the last time he put his mouth on Malfoy’s, got a hand in his hair, how far away that was, getting farther every day. He thinks about Ginny’s wild smile over the breakfast table that summer after Hogwarts, flirting with him while her mother’s back was turned, and how his chest had ached, too tight, when he’d seen her with Dean the next evening, a flare of jealousy he’d seized upon as love. It would be simple to take Ron’s _Right_ as the moment to blame, but—

But it wasn’t that moment. It was everything else.

So what _did_ it matter, really, in the end.

It’s good with Ginny. She follows Quidditch even more religiously than Harry and they spend half their weekends cheering over matches on the WWN, followed by lazy Sunday lie-ins and dinners at the Burrow. Hermione and Ron are finally both single at the same time, arguing incessantly while the Weasleys all make whispered background bets on when they’ll reunite, and it’s a relief to have someone to complain about it with, to come home from pub nights rolling their eyes at each other as they peel off scarves and cloaks, recounting, _oh, and then he said—and did you see—ridiculous, really—when will they—!_

Only once, after sex, does she ask, ‘Are you thinking about him?’ 

And Harry wasn’t, but then he is, thinking of how the first time Malfoy fucked him, he spent half the evening biting at his lip, and his hand trembled on Harry’s thigh when he said in a rush, ‘What if I hurt you, though.’ Harry said, ‘You won’t,’ and Malfoy said, determined, ‘No, I, I won’t.’ And he had been careful, fingering him open at a torturously slow pace, until Harry was mindless with it, gasping open-mouthed against the sheets, and Malfoy said wonderingly, ‘You love this,’ as if he couldn’t quite believe it, and Harry said yes, _yes_.

‘It’s better with you,’ he tells Ginny, because he doesn’t know what else to say. ‘It’s different.’ So different he could never even begin to compare them.

She makes him laugh. They eat takeaway together and have favorite Muggle TV shows and spend one memorable Saturday shopping for a sofa, the first new furniture either of them has ever owned. She is good with Teddy, brings him signed Quidditch posters and always asks Andromeda before feeding him sweets. She even charms Dudley, over an awkward family dinner that Uncle Vernon fumes through, though even he is partially won over by the cake she produces for dessert (filched from Molly’s kitchen and shamelessly claimed as Ginny’s own).

Sometime that winter, Malfoy gets married, he and his pale bride stiff and frowning in their picture in the Prophet. They aren’t holding hands, aren’t even touching. Still: ‘Who the fuck is Astoria Greengrass?’ Harry asks Hermione the next day at lunch, apropos of nothing, and the smile drops right off her face, replaced by a pained look she’s made a million times at Ron but has rarely ever directed at him.

‘She was at Hogwarts with us, Harry,’ Hermione says in quiet exasperation. ‘A few years behind us.’

They don’t talk any more about Astoria after that.

Harry wonders if Malfoy is happy, and thinks about Owling him, and doesn’t.

They get a kitten, and a house, and eventually a son.

He sees Malfoy’s name in the Prophet sometimes, or on rare occasions, sees the man himself, across Diagon Alley, down the hall in the Ministry. Sometimes they nod at each other. Sometimes they don’t.

 _This is the way things are_ , Harry thinks, every time. _There was no other way_.

How could there have been?

‘Do you ever wish,’ Harry says once to Hermione, when she’s sleeping in their guest room after a fight with Ron, and Ginny’s off to Europe with the Harpies for a series of exhibition games. ‘I mean. Do you ever think that if we had parents, things might have turned out differently?’

Hermione frowns. ‘How do you mean?’

It’s a sore subject with her, even now, and the only one she’ll really talk about it with is Harry. She’d gone to Australia, of course, after the war, only to find that her parents had adopted a baby and named her Hermione. ‘They must have kept dreaming of a girl with my name,’ she had sobbed to him one night in his kitchen, after finishing most of a bottle of wine. ‘They must have thought it was a sign they should have had a daughter.’

‘You could try—’ Harry and Ron had attempted to broach with her, in those early years, but she always shook her head and said, brittle, ‘No. I can’t.’

 _I can’t_.

Now, Harry says in the careful way he’s learned to talk about her family, ‘Just. If we had someone to—to ask about this. What to do. What not to do. You know. I just always feel like I’m mucking it up, and if not my mum, then Remus, at least, or Dumbledore—’

‘You think Albus Dumbledore would have had good relationship advice for you?’ Hermione snorts into her tea. ‘Perennially single, reported to be pining for life over a Dark wizard he defeated decades before?’

Harry swallows. ‘I—suppose not.’

Hermione just looks at him, and she gets that frown that he thinks of as _the Malfoy frown_. ‘Oh,’ is all she says. ‘I see.’

‘Yes,’ Harry says.

‘We’re all probably shit at it, I think, parents or not,’ Hermione shrugs eventually. ‘I mean, look at Ron.’

‘Hm,’ Harry says, who has long since learned not to take sides in their fights.

‘Honestly,’ Hermione adds. ‘Don’t you think I sometimes dream of other ways my life could have gone? But it’s just the way it is. If I were living some grand other life, I’d probably be sitting on your sofa crying about how I should have ended up with Ron. And you—’

‘Yes,’ Harry says, quickly, before she can say anything more damning. ‘Yeah, maybe.’ 

They speak just once, at a Hogwarts fundraiser ten years after the war. Harry’s spent the evening letting Ron top off their cups of punch with whisky and feeling maudlin about Teddy going off to Hogwarts in little more than a year’s time, so when he encounters Malfoy by a garish display about the heroism of Severus Snape, he’s tired and a bit drunk.

He grasps at this for the reason why, when Malfoy makes to turn away, Harry says, ‘Draco,’ though he’s never once called him that out loud.

Malfoy looks as startled by it as Harry himself is. He says, cautious, ‘Hi, Potter.’

‘Horrible, isn’t it?’ Harry says, gesturing at the display. 

Malfoy gives a small snort. ‘Likely made by some Ministry hack who’d never even met the man.’

He looks noticeably older, hair nearly at his shoulders, frown lines around his mouth, and it startles Harry. He has days when he still feels eighteen, and then his left knee will ache or he’ll wake to Al wailing and he’ll blink, bewildered as to how exactly he got here. Malfoy’s robes are buttoned high at the collar but look soft, a rich forest color that Harry loves.

‘You look,’ Harry says, tongue tripping over it, what he can’t put words behind. ‘Malfoy. I.’

‘Getting less eloquent every year, aren’t you?’ Malfoy observes. ‘At this rate, by the time your sprog is at Hogwarts, you’ll be communicating in grunts.’

‘Don’t do that.’

‘Insult you?’

Harry says wearily, ‘Pretend.’

‘Don’t you pretend,’ Malfoy hisses, and even that, Harry finds he’s missed. ‘That you know me. That you ever did. That what we are to each other—’

‘Yes,’ Harry says. ‘What are we?’

Malfoy is glaring at the artist's rendition of a young Severus, who's cradling an armful of Moondew flowers and peering into a Potions cauldron with a saintly, un-Snape-like smile. He says, more to the portrait than to Harry, ‘Must you dredge up what’s ancient history? I am who I am. You are who you are. That’s the way it is.’

‘It doesn’t have to be. It didn’t.’

Malfoy’s gaze softens, just a fraction. ‘Harry. It does.’

Harry thinks of Ron’s frank, sorry frown in the warm light of their favorite pub, years ago now. _Ancient history._ He says, ‘Are you happy?’

Malfoy returns reflexively, like casting a defensive spell, ‘Are you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Harry says, too honestly.

He’s not _unhappy_ , as Hermione’s forever pointing out. And perhaps there’s some other lifetime where he is, where they make each other miserable, where Malfoy freezes him out for long stretches and throws Dark heirlooms at him when they fight, and that Harry always thinks, _Why didn’t we just call it off when we could’ve made it out of this alive?_

Across the room, he sees Ginny giving him a pointed wave, her other hand on her hip. It’s a pose reminiscent of Molly Weasley, which makes Harry feel a wave of affection for both of them, though he knows if he ever made the comparison to her face he’d be sleeping on the couch for a week. As it is, her eyes are hard, watching him with Malfoy. He knows they’ll fight about it when they get home, whispering so the kids don’t wake, and then he’ll draw her a bath with the fluorescent pink Drooble’s Bubbling Bathtime Solution that George gifted them as a joke last Christmas, and she’ll snort and have no choice but to forgive him.

‘Go back to your life, Potter,’ Malfoy says, almost gentle. 

Helpless, Harry does.

And maybe he did love him, and what did it matter. Or maybe he didn’t, after all. What could he have known of love, in five short months of too many shadows and sidelong glances that never said enough?

 _Love is work_ , Harry repeats to himself often, in echo of a relationship counselor he and Ginny saw a few years back. It isn’t fourth floor bathrooms and somebody’s eyes shut like they can’t bear to look at you because it might give away just how much you undo them, it’s diapers and family dinners and making coffee for each other even when you’ve been fighting for days. 

Ginny touches his face, one day, when he’s sitting in their garden watching Al toddle around, and there must be something in his expression because she says, ‘Are you—do you still think about him?’

 _I think about him every day_ , Harry wants to say, though that’s a lie. It isn’t every day, just some of them, certain cold mornings or muggy, starless nights, when he wakes up and recalls the way Malfoy looked at him back then, his gray eyes serious but somehow warm, staring up at Harry in rare moments as if Harry had all the answers, as if, were he to only say the things that needed to be said, that would finally make everything okay. But what could he have said?

‘It was a long time ago,’ Harry says now. The leaves are starting to change, turn the deep crimson color they had been the day of their wedding, and there’s a chill in the air, a sharp and melancholy breeze that never fails to remind him of her, of this, of them.

He looks up at Ginny and says, with fondness, ‘Hey. You. I chose you.’

She sits down on the bench beside him and leans against him, just for a minute, a minute, before Lily starts to cry. ‘I know,’ she says. Her voice is terribly sad. ‘I know.’


End file.
